Farewell, 2015

Below is a slightly revised version of the most recent edition of the Solstice newsletter that I mail out to friends and relatives every year.

In addition to hyperlinks to Internet sites that give more information about certain organizations I mention,I’ve inserted links to various blogposts I’ve written that supply further details – and photos – of the places or experiences mentioned.

Out-of-State Trips:

A glorious week in May on Florida’s St. George Island, hanging out for a second consecutive year with a dozen pals I met through the Gay Spirit Visions organization I’ve been affiliated with for over 25 years.

A week-long road trip to Michigan in late June, so my friend Nancy and I could visit the childhood stomping grounds of our friend Kris.

Three trips to Asheville, NC (in June, July and October) to conduct oral history interviews with six longtime Gay Spirit Visions participants (more below about that project).

 A couple days in October near Washington, DC, at the Takoma Park home of my dear friend Terry.

 Two weeks in late November visiting sun-drenched Costa Rica with my GSV friends Randall and Greg. I’d long wanted to visit that interesting and absolutely gorgeous country, so I was glad to find travel companions to make the visit with me.

Volunteer Activities

 In 2015 my friend Randall and I conducted oral histories with twelve fellow GSV participants: six interviews in Atlanta, six in Asheville. The memories these men have shared with us have been invaluable as well as often very moving, and we’re glad these guys’ stories are now documented at the GSV archive located at Georgia State University’s library. Randall and I are planning another round of GSV interviews in 2016.

The GSV oral history project, by the way, grew out of my ongoing participation in the monthly meetings of the Georgia LGBTQ Archives Project.

A highlight of the Project’s activities this year was its members’ contributions to an exhibit about Atlanta’s gay and lesbian history currently on display at the city’s National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

 In a separate archival project, I donated to the GSU Library’s Special Collections Department several hundred letters that friends and acquaintances have written me over the years. I am particularly happy that the letters and emails exchanged between my friend Blanche and me since 1965 and between my former partner Harvey and me since 1979 and are now archived at GSU. If you are one of the other people who ever wrote me a letter, know that it too has been archived for some hypothethical Researcher From The Future researcher deciding for some reason to sample a lifetime’s worth of correspondence addressed to a non-famous Southern gay man!

 I substantially increased the amount of time devoted to devoting to working in the library of the local Quaker Meeting-house. This year, I’ve been meeting for several hours almost every week with several other Meetinghouse attendees to revamp the library’s collection and to nudge the library further into the Digital Age.

 I attended an eight-week course about death and dying sponsored by Emory University’s continuing education department and taught by a former biology professor and fellow Quaker Meeting attendee.

 On my computer at home, I’ve watched three different series of college-level lectures, learning a great deal more than the little I already knew about Soren Kierkegaard, the history of the Hebrew scriptures, and the role of symmetry in art and nature.

 I’ve met seven times since last August with seven of my GSV buddies to collectively educate ourselves about the Enneagram, a personality-typing scheme I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it in the 1970s.

Meditative Practices

 Once a month I join a half-dozen or so acquaintances of my friend Randall who assemble at his house to meditate for about forty minutes and then snarf down the delicious meal Randall serves.

 On most Sunday mornings that I’m in town, I attend the weekly silent meditation service at the local Quaker Meetinghouse. I do this not because I am a Quaker myself, but because I admire so many of the people in this congregation, and beause I find it so much easier to meditate with others than when alone.

 I’m now in my sixth year of taking weekly tai chi classes, which I also practice solo most mornings in a nearby park.

Update on My Mom’s Health

My 88-year old mother still lives independently at the house in the Atlanta suburb of East Point where she raised her five kids. This past year she decided it’s no longer safe to drive her car, although that wise decision keeps her at home far more often than she’d prefer. Otherwise, my mom’s health is holding up well for a person who’s coping with the aftermath of three minor strokes.

Garden Notes

 I got a bit carried away this year when I planted my herb garden – two dozen herbs are about a dozen too many! One the other hand, I enjoyed my two pots of pineapple sage so much this year (especially after they flowered so spectacularly), next year I’m planting three pots of pineapple sage!

 After years of admiring the Tuscan Cypress near the patio at the house of my friends Joyce and Walter, I finally bought and planted this summer two cypresses in my back yard. So far, they’re still both alive.

 I built the first of three raised beds where I hope to one day grow a few fruits and vegetables other than my usual tiny crops of tomatoes, peppers, and blueberries.

 I further organized and festooned the garden shed my brother Mike built for me in 2014.

 I replaced the pump in my much-enjoyed patio fountain, and purchased temporary screening for the patio door so I could hear the fountain inside the house.

On the Socializing Frontier…

To broaden our networks of gay male acquaintances, two friends and I decided to host in 2015 a series of informal dinners at each of our houses. The three of us committed to the idea of each of us inviting to each supper a non-partnered gay man who we didn’t know well, but would like to know better. We spent nine pleasant evenings together with some lovely guys before the repeated challenge of confining our invitations to non-partnered newcomers eventually became too burdensome. However, this social experiment did confirm my hunch that I much prefer socializing with people – especially with people new to me – in very small groups (six people max!).

 In another gay male acquaintance-widening effort, I attended four in-town events hosted by the Wilderness Network of Georgia, a gay hiking group. No new friendships have (so far) resulted, but I’ve met some nice guys.

 I decided again this year to host at my house three Winter Solstice gatherings. (By the time one is 67 years old, one has met a quite a large number of congenial people who one wants to invite over for some Solstice-saluting relaxing in front of the fireplace fire in my tiny living room. Hence the need for multiple teas!)

This year’s fifteen (!) overnight visitors included friends from other parts of Georgia, from Florida, and from North Carolina.

Miscellaneous 2015 Factoids

 I enjoyed another year’s worth of pleasant motor scooter trips (vs. using my pickup) to accomplish most of my in-town errands.

I didn’t attend more than a few of the weekly gay square dancing sessions that I’d been enjoying for several previous years. Not sure why my interest in this enjoyable activity diminished this past year. Just too long a drive there and back, perhaps?

 I re-formatted my six-year-old Internet blog and followed through on my 2015 resolution to post material to it more often. What I regrettably did not post more often to in 2015 than I did in 2014 was the other blog I maintain, the Atlanta Booklover’s Blog.

The Constant Reader: My Year in Books

Those of you who follow my blog know that I post in the blog’s sidebar a list of the books I’m reading and brief comments on each one as I finish it. Again this year, I have collected into a single blogpost these mini-reviews, re-arranged the titles according to the (subjective) relative wonderfulness of each title within its category. You’ll find those reviews here.

Year-End “Checkup from the Neck Up”*

* A nifty phrase my calligraphy teacher uses to begin her classes.

Readers of earlier editions of this newsletter may remember that I have often disturbed my usually contented heart with the stubborn belief that I would surely be much happier if I were part of an ongoing relationship with a life partner. Part of me still believes this, and puts energy into wondering how I could more efficiently embark upon another such partnership.

Nevertheless, at some point earlier this year, I distinctly remember sort of mentally handing over to my friends and acquaintances – and/or to Fate – the exhausting task of somehow locating my next Prince Charming.

Also earlier this year it occurred to me that perhaps I should firmly lay aside for awhile The Great Search and just assume that maybe Mr. Charming is out there looking for me – and might even find me eventually – through his efforts rather than through mine.

Sometime in early November, I suddenly realized I’d spent several consecutive weeks(!) completely free of any troublesome frustration that Mr. Next Prince Charming has not materialized in the eight years since my most recent Significant Partnership ended eight years ago.

I cannot claim to know how or why this significant mental shift occurred, what it means, or if it will endure, but this long-awaited change in my outlook/mood has been mighty welcome!

This unexpected emotional gear-changing has further improved what was already the startlingly stress-free life that I’ve enjoyed since retiring three years ago next March.

At any rate, I do often catch myself appreciating what a relatively charmed – if far from perfect – life I seem to be living these days. Naturally I am hoping that whatever unpleasant surprises 2016 brings will be neither radical nor permanent. And of course that’s my New Year’s wish for all of you, too.

From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated February 20, 2019

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

JUST FINISHED:

Asymmetry (2018) by Lisa Halliday

I read this award-winning debut novel for my book club. The book is devoted to two different sets of characters (and two different settings). Halliday is an excellent writer, but I couldn’t find myself caring too much about the fate of the main characters in the first story (involving a Manhattan-based novelist and his much younger mistress). The second set of characters (an Iraqi-American and his family and acquaintances) were also drawn very vividly, but what I appreciated the most about this part of the book was Halliday’s skillful insertion of the horrific damage caused to civilians by the U.S. government’s imperialistic venture in Iraq. The third part of the novel (an interview with the novelist featured in the first part of Asymmetry) seemed tacked on and unnecessary. I’d recommend this author, but not this book.

CURRENTLY READING (in addition to trying to keep up with the most recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Southern Garden (1942) by Elizabeth Lawrence

As William James Said: Extracts from the Published Writings of William James (1942) edited by Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich

BOOKS FINISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR:

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town(2009) by David Farley

I ran across this book at a recent library book sale, and am so glad I did. Part travel diary, part detective story, part history, it has two things bound to capture my interest: it’s a chronicle of an American living for a year in a tiny Italian hilltop town for a year, intermingled with a dogged quest for understanding (and locating) a notorious holy relic. Who knew that the fervent veneration of Jesus’s circumcised foreskin (yes, you read that correctly!) had such a long and interesting career? Farley’s sense of humor and his scrupulous scholarship, together make this a delightful romp of a book – and a thoroughly entertaining case study of the absurdity (and lucrativeness) of religious cults. And I was happy to see, in Farley’s notes, his reference to another Italy-themed travelog I enjoyed reading years ago, Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the history of the World (2007).

In the Morning: Reflections from First Light (2006) by Philip Lee Williams

Like me, this book’s author is a “morning person.” Unlike me, he writes about his early morning walks, and this book is a sampling of the thoughts that those pre-dawn walks have provoked over the years. Williams is both a poet and a science writer, and his ruminations show that fact. Williams lives about 90 miles from where I do, so that was an added plus in my enjoyment of these essays.

Somewhere Near the End: A Memoir (2009) by Diana Athill

By happy coincidence, the same week that one of my author heroines, Diana Athill, died (at age 101), I discovered that I’d at some point purchased – but never got around to starting – a copy of Somewhere Near the End, now over eight years old. I eagerly plucked it from my bookshelf and spent most of the next three days devouring it. The adjectives in the blurbs excerpted from the book’s reviews are, for once, are spot-on: “remorseless and tender,” “a wisdom more ambient than aphoristic,” “refreshingly candid,” “fiercely intelligent…and never dull,” “unflinching,” “deals with growing old with bravery, humor and honesty,” “prose as clear and graceful as ever,” “brilliant; entirely lacking in the usual regrets [and] nostalgia.” “as unalarmed by the prospect of death as by the seeming meaninglessness of the universe,” “her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting”, “bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim.’ Or, to use the description supplied by the organization that gave this book its annual award for biography: “candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and, above all, beautifully, beautifully written.” If I were ever to embark on any writing project myself, I would aim to write with the precision, the honesty, and the humility of Diana Athill.

Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World(1988; updated 1997) by Tom Cowan

Brief and straightforward biographical sketches of over 40 lesbians and gay men who enriched the fields of art, literature, theater, music, science, social science, or philosophy. A bit like spending time reading a series of Wikipedia entries, I was often surprised at the author’s ability to clearly express why he’d chosen these particular worthies over the ones he omitted. In any case, I learned – in almost every bio – something new (to me) and important about celebrities I (mistakenly) thought I already knew a fair amount about.

Ultimate Questions (2016) by Brian Magee

I am not familiar with the Britain-based Magee’s earlier works, but am so glad he wrote this one and so glad I found it. (His earlier book, ThePhilosophy of Schopenhauer will be the next book by Magee that I will track down). One reviewer wrote about this book: “Magee writes clearly, without jargon, and he makes his case for profound agnosticism with considerable force.” Exactly so; in fact, this is probably the single most compelling book of modern philosophy I have ever read. It’s also one of the most eloquent and least pompous books of philosophy I have ever read. This is a book I will buy a copy of for the sheer pleasure of re-reading its arrestingly clear (and mostly irrefutable) sentences.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) by James Clear

This book’s bringing together of what scientists and psychologists know about habit formation (the making of new ones, the breaking of old ones) is not only useful, but entertainingly presented. Because of the author’s engaging style and his incorporation of findings from multiple post-behaviorism fields (like neurolinguistic programming), it took a while for me to realize that the book is largely a recapitulation of what I’d learned in college (50 years ago!) about operant conditioning. Still, there were things about how habits are formed and how they persist that I needed to be reminded of, especially some of the counter-intuitive features of habit formation, and I am using some of the author’s tips to create some better habits in 2019 – and to get rid of a few undesirable ones.